


Rivets

by Jaune_Chat



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Cock Piercing, Cover Art, F/M, Genital Piercing, Hand Jobs, M/M, Memories, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Nipple Piercings, Oral Sex, Piercings, Post-Captain America: The First Avenger, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Recovered Memories, Tongue Piercings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-05
Updated: 2015-01-05
Packaged: 2018-03-05 13:33:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3122099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaune_Chat/pseuds/Jaune_Chat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier was starting to remember, and would stitch himself back together any way he could.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rivets

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Brighteyed Jill for betaing! And thank you to notallbees for the artwork! [Art Link Here](http://jaune-chat.livejournal.com/188581.html)
> 
> Written for a [prompt at avengerkink](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/19023.html?thread=43898959#t43898959). Filled my own prompt. Not sorry. ;D

For a month after the Helicarriers fall, the asset tried to understand what had happened to him. Why he knew the man, the mission, who had pulled the beam off of him, why his mission had called the asset by another name. Why his mission had refused to fight him at the last, when he would have had the advantage. Why the mission had persisted in his goals instead of enacting self-preservation procedures.

Why the asset had rescued his mission from drowning and left him alive. Why he hadn’t returned to storage and rest.

There was a spark, a tickle of heat in his mind, the kind that usually only came after weeks-long deployment. The sight of the mission, the name he had called him ( _“Bucky?”_ ), it triggered that heat, that uncertain, unregulated knowledge that was never supposed to be part of a deployment package. And that… it necessitated investigation, answers, if he was to be functional.

Also, there was no prep team left to return him to storage. Coming back to the bank vault and the prep chamber therein had shown signs of hasty departure.

The asset was on permanent, long-term detached assignment. 

He had only one last mission in his mind, one last… subject, if no longer target. (The subject could not be eliminated, he contained vital information about… something. He could _not_ be eliminated.) 

The asset turned to alternate sources of information, more haphazard than the intelligence reports he was usually fed, but he had been forced to gather his own intelligence in the past when his team had failed. It was then that he went to a public display at a museum, a museum where he not only learned about the subject, but also saw his own face staring back at him from a half-dozen displays.

He knew why he was never deployed long; he extrapolated the information out of the fragments that his prep team frequently neglected to erase. The same experiments done to him that allowed him to survive the trauma that had brought him to HYDRA’s attention, the experimental arm, the hard physical training, the constant bouts of cryosleep, the dangerous missions, and had let him learn different languages, techniques, technologies, and maps so quickly, they must let him heal just as fast. His brain must have been constantly battling back the damage from the wiping procedures, the electroshock, drugs, and odd medicinal lobotomy. 

Those memories… they kept coming back. Not always in order, or with full context, but random, unmoored images and sounds and sensations. It was confusing, distracting (and sometimes, desirable?), and it was the reason he had always submitted to wiping, because he needed to know something solid, instead of those uncertain echoes. HYDRA would give him a mission, a single purpose.

Now he had to make up his own. And he was badly compromised. The heat of memory was pressing against his ability to hold them back, to continue to be of use. He had to find a way to maintain mental equilibrium, or remove himself from service. (The asset was not allowed to remove himself from service. The asset... did not _want_ to remove himself.)

After the museum, he headed somewhere remote, a cabin once used on a mission. There was a body buried 5.2 miles east southeast of the cabin with a single .30 caliber rifle wound through the head. No one had used the place since that time. He stole supplies from a store fifty miles away, while the memories were still just mildly obtrusive – food, clothing, fuel, gear, medical supplies, whatever he hadn’t been able to scavenge from the vault. He’d operated without a support team before, and he had performed minor surgery on himself in the field. He was aware of his nutritional requirements. The asset thought he was not supposed to remember information like that, but such procedures had been useful so often eventually the technicians stopped wiping them entirely to save time. He remembered hearing their griping as he opened his mouth to accept the mouthguard, soft chatter as he screamed in the chair.

It was startling to realize exactly how much he already remembered.

The asset could only hope he would remain cognizant of his requirements, because this time there would be no helpful prep team waiting to wipe him of the avalanche he could feel was coming. He had just enough time to set up the cabin when the memories descended on him. Buildings, rooms, people in clothes he doesn’t see anymore, voices, smells, tastes, faces he knew and didn't know. The faces and voices didn’t always go together. Colors bled and faded, there were sounds of singing and laughing and arguing and screaming everywhere. Pain and pleasure swirled and mixed and pushed to the edges of his endurance, hot and cold assaulted him in waves.

_Finger on the trigger, bodies falling away. Death, sleep, cold, over and over and over and over. His brain stuffed full of things to make him relevant as he was dragged back from the edge of death again and again._

_A voice, hollow with hope and disbelief. “Bucky?”_

When he remembered how to, he screamed.

\--

He later determined he lost two weeks to pain, vivid hallucinations, waking dreams, screaming, throwing himself against walls, and at least two attempts to outrun his overloaded mind. He came to covered in mud both times, freezing and bleeding, and only animal instinct made him seek his den before another wave of terrifying images come to torment him again.

When he finally came back to himself, eyes opening in solid awareness of time and place, he took careful stock of only thing he was certain of: his own body. He estimated he’d lost five kilos and significant muscle tone. He had lacerations on his feet, right hand, and legs, crudely bandaged. He considered it very fortunate that there was no gangrene. 

The memories hadn’t entirely settled, the oldest ones in particular were still very fragmented. The newer ones though… the _contrast_ between the newer memories etched in cold and pain to the old impressions of laughter and warmth and safety even in the midst of danger firmed his resolve to master everything in his mind. 

The man, his last mission, he had helped when the asset would have killed him, refused to fight at the end because he believed they shared a past. The asset did not believe the subject had lied. He-

James. He was a bundle of parameters and procedure and operational knowledge, but at one point he’d had a real name. He’d been called Ivan, Yasha, asset, hey you, son, boy. James might have been… At least it was common, it was something he could try to be, and identity he could hang these new memories on. Bucky, what the subject had called him, he didn’t know yet.

He was no longer so compromised he couldn’t operate. Things in his mind were healing, and the memories no longer cascaded so uncontrollably. He was back to a point he could start to look for answers. Spared the drain of cryosleep and wiping, James recovered quickly, pushing his body back to top performance levels. His mind was nowhere near as well as his body yet, but this would be by far the first time he had operated at partial capacity. He had been doing that for his entire time with HYDRA. 

There was a different kind of heat that flared in him when that thought occurred, like someone else inside of him was shouting in fury. Some aspect of his past, what or who, he didn't know, found his situation intolerable to the point of rage. James didn't share that passion, but could agree with the focus.

He needed to be ready. He had questions.

\--

The Winter Soldier had been granted access to nearly every HYDRA safe house at one point or another, either as a base for cryosleep and prep or as an operational staging point. His memory for all of them remained clear, had remained clear for many years, as too many techs had figured it was pointless to wipe and re-implant all of them each time. They hadn’t recognized the significance of the knowledge.

He found one of those techs in an Oklahoma City safe house, hiding out with two assistants in a small house in a quiet part of town. James waited until they came home from grocery shopping to interrogate them. It was a shameful laxity in security protocols to have all of them gone at the same time, and none of them thought to do a perimeter check before blithely unlocking the door. Clearly they had come from a civilian background, and no member of HYDRA with better operational training knew they were here. This was a significantly advantageous find. He waited until all three of them were inside before shutting the door behind them. They jumped and swore, none of them reaching for weapons they probably wouldn’t even know how to use, even if they'd had them on their person. James had their indifferent collection of firearms lined up on the table in front of him. Then he turned on the light.

All of them went silent.

The lead tech was the one that found his voice first, shock giving way to something like surprise. “My God, I thought you were dead!” he blurted out. He babbled for minutes on end, about how the entire prep team had fled in fear when the Helicarriers had crashed, how they had been certain the Winter Soldier had died because Captain America was still alive.

_(“Bucky?” Shock, disbelief, wild hope on the subject’s face. “Bucky?” James didn’t know where the memory fit in to his history. He shunted it aside for now.)_

“I didn’t die.” He’d made a choice, one he didn’t fully understand. He expected there might be some answers here, information in files he hadn't had access too, linear progression of the memories that sprawled messily through his brain. “I’m remembering.”

There was a flash of animal panic across the tech’s face. He had a name, and after a minute, it resurfaced in James’ mind. Craft. And Craft was afraid.

“Oh… I’m so sorry. I can get some electroshock units, I think. We lost your original hardware, but I know all the specs by heart. I can make the memories stop,” Craft said with confidence over a layer of brittle fear.

It would have been so, so soothing to do that, to have the memories stop, no matter how painful it would be at first. There would be no more memory flashes without place or context, no more uncertainty. Part of him wanted to. Part of him craved it like a drug.

_(Part of him mumbled his name, rank, and serial number over and over and over again as the enemy pumped him full of drugs and pain.)_

Why had he become so docile as to think of removing everything he knew as being soothing? The mumbling one… 

_(“Bucky?” A plaintive, heart-clenchingly familiar tone. “Bucky?”)_

He had had strength in his mind. It had been a strong mind, as strong as James’ body. The strength appealed. He had survived on his own for these last months. He hadn’t required a prep team to drive him places and hand him weapons and point him at his target. He didn’t want to _require_ anyone. The passionate voice inside him, where the name James... _Bucky_ might reside, snarled in agreement.

_(They’ll come for me. Hold out, Barnes, they’ll come…)_

“Tell me why.”

Craft blinked, like he’d just heard his dog make a comment. The two assistants looked at each other behind Craft’s back and swallowed hard.

“Tell me why I should.”

_(“You helped shape the world.” Pierce’s grandfatherly smile. Bodies falling away, bullet after bullet. “Bucky?”)_

“Tell me everything,” James insisted.

“You’re the best HYDRA has. You helped push us where we needed to be to try to save the world. And you started out with nothing, really. I studied you. Nothing but a high school education, no real second languages but a decent physical background. I’ve seen your specs now, and you’re fluent in half a dozen languages and conversant in more…” Craft waxed eloquent about reams of information hypnotically induced, drug enhanced into James’ brain, the languages, geography, specifications on weapons and equipment and technology, with all the enthusiasm of a child showing off a new toy. “I heard stories, but they were all so true when I finally got a chance to work on you. Dr. Zola built you up from half-nothing. HYDRA made you who you are!” Craft sounded very proud, and James had been keeping a bewildered expression on his face the entire time he had been talking.

HYDRA had saved his life. Educated him beyond what he could have hoped for. Given him a new arm, better than anything else that existed.

“How many missions have I run?” That was still amongst the fuzzy images in his mind, uncertain in their details, but there was body after body falling in his mind. He remembered some, but the entire tally was unclear.

“Ah… the exact number is classified, but it has to be over a hundred, several of them back-to-back or multi-kills. Maybe a lot more. Might be three or four hundred, if what some of the guys said was true,” Craft said thoughtfully.

James had a wealth of knowledge and experience. Two functioning arms. A reputation as a cold-blooded assassin. Over a hundred people, or more, dead at his hands. Seventy years of his life stolen without his consent. And no clear memory of his past because Craft and his predecessors had tried repeatedly to destroy it.

“That’s enough,” he said softly.

Craft looked hopeful. “I know where your back-up tube is. I could put you back in cryo until the leadership returns.”

Seventy _years_. James flexed his metal arm.

_(Battered face and blurred voice, “I’m not going to fight you.” The shield, falling…)_

Something broke, and anger like a tidal wave consumed him, rushing out of the shadowed, fuzzy places to drop a red haze over his eyes. A voice rose from his mouth, not his own, from a sudden surge of certainty and mental strength he didn't even know he possessed.

“That knowledge, the arm, that’s severance pay for _seventy years of my life!_ ”

Craft had barely enough time to look surprised before James broke his neck. A silenced pistol removed the two assistants from the mortal coil, and the rage subsided, drawing back inside. Cool procedure took over, and James let it. The asset had dealt with situations like this many more times than whomever had just spoken such passion from his mouth.

James collected the rest of the cash and needful ID supplies, skipped town and dropped an anonymous tip about the bodies from a pay phone at a truck stop. Someone would at least puzzle over their deaths. That was more than he could say about some of his victims at HYDRA's orders.

\--

He spent a week in motels, planning his next move. The memories came and went, attached to nothing in particular, inconsistently triggered by certain sights or sounds or smells, but he slowly learned how to live with that. As importantly, he knew he couldn’t stay quiet forever. If he wanted to form new memories, learn about his last subject, he had to find a way to move around openly.

 _(“Steve Rogers, you’re a class A fuck-up.” “What’s that make you then?” A cheeky grin neither of them tried to hide.)_ He didn’t know where that went either. But he tried to remember the name for later.

James looked at his left arm. He couldn’t show himself, couldn’t ask around. He had to find a way to engage in recognizance without being noticed.

Well, he had knowledge. He would use it to its full potential. He would figure out what freedom was.

_(“Truth, justice, and the All-American way,” Bucky sing-songed. “I’m not Superman, Bucky!” “Coulda fooled me in that outfit.” Steve blushed. Genuine kicker of all Nazi ass, and he blushed like a schoolgirl. Dork.)_

It turned out that freedom found him. Another night of memories and dreams that weren’t quite nightmares, and he was awake again at o’dark thirty. They were so fragmented, unsure of where they fit in, that they just floated around in his head. In what was becoming a ritual, he clasped his flesh hand over metal. There were memories there, some painful, some neutral, learning to use it, why he had it. Some amazing feats of strength with messy, bloody ends. Those memories were solid and consistently retrievable.

He wished some of the others were.

James shook off the pointless melancholy as other needs made themselves known. He needed food, and shrugged on a jacket and gloves over his hands before heading out to a twenty-four hour grocery store near his current motel. If he couldn’t feed one hunger in him, he would have to feed another. He gathered up supplies for a week, occasionally blinking back old fragments of how things “used to be.” He didn’t know where the store from his memories existed, or even if it ever really did.

When he was waiting in the checkout line (the inexplicable early-hour rush in full force), the girl ahead of him dropped a carton of eggs when trying to fumble it out of her basket. He was so proud that he was able to catch it left-handed without crushing it before it crashed into the floor that he didn’t notice the gap between his jacket and glove gaping metallic until the grateful girl said, “Wicked cuff. You into punk?”

_(“You into scat, Bucky?” A girl winked at him and her hair looked dark and soft and wonderful.)_

There was a winning smile somewhere in that memory, and he tried a ghost of it on for size. Surprisingly, it didn't feel unnatural on his face. “Yeah.”

“Sweet.”

She had a glimmer of metal in her mouth, a barbell shot through her tongue. Metal. It tugged on his mind.

“Why that one?” he asked, gesturing vaguely at her mouth.

“Nice to play with. Looks sexy. Boyfriend likes it,” she said, giving a shrug as she turned to put her things on the conveyor belt.

James thought he’d seen something oddly profound.

\--

He tried an experiment – if it fucked up, he’d heal clean. He bought a small earring stud from a store with cash, and used a needle to punch through the lobe of his right ear. The stud followed, and he let his mind drift until another memory floated by. He clung as long as he could, a memory of laughter from Steve _(Steve, when he remembers that name, he remembers the subject, little, blond, flicking him the ear to get his attention)_. James touched the stud and held it and held it and held it…

Then he went and distracted himself with a weapons’ check, perimeter check, watching the news, searching the Internet with painful slowness for ways to hide his left arm better. After two hours, he idly touched the stud again. 

_(Steve laughing, head thrown back and howling with laughter at some stupid joke. He’d been smaller. It’d been before the war. Summer. Bucky standing, his own laughter covering up the fact that Steve was just as good as any girl he’d ever met, and even better.)_

The memory had _stayed_.

His eyes had grown hot, and he wiped away the moisture quickly.

\--

James had three more tiny studs in his right ear and one in his left when he watched a late night show about certain sub cultures, punk and goth, with their heavy jewelry and sometimes elaborate clothes. Seeing the images on the television, he knew that was answer, something he’d already know, but this put it into words. He was different. He would always be different. Normal wasn’t for him anymore. And if he couldn’t pass as normal… Where did you hide a red fish? In a pond of other red fish.

He touched the sleek metal of his arm as he came to that conclusion. That limb was _his_ , bought and paid for a hundred times over. The metal… James (Bucky, maybe, he was thinking about using it, and it was starting to sound less strange all the time) looked at himself in the mirror, naked. The metal studs looked… _He_ had put that in his body. He had. They moored those floating memories, nailed them down and put them in place. And the metal… looked good. James knew he didn’t look like the pictures and images in the museum, the man he might have been. He never would again.

He wanted to be… himself. And if it was different, looked different… Well, Steve wouldn’t have a leg to stand on, considering his costume and the company he kept.

It didn’t escape his notice that he was able to think of the subject as Steve without a twinge of unease.

\--

James (Bucky) touched the fifth new stud down the shell of his right ear, and remembered there had been a girl in the next apartment building over whom he dated (Christine? Angela? He thought he hardly remembered even at the time) who had taught him how to sew. He’d learned just to humor her, and certainly he never learned enough to make his own clothes, but he could sew a rip or fix popped seams or adjust hemlines, and that had been a godsend during the war. James knew he had to leave the motels sometime, and until his new disguise was complete, he didn’t want to test the waters very much. He was no longer in the back of the beyond, he was in civilization. He had to be. His answers were here. Steve was here, somewhere.

He found a battered black leather jacket at a flea market (he had a bad moment, remembering the dark leather costume he’d worn on missions, but this was _his_ , dammit, and he made himself remember trying to thread a needle next to a pretty woman, touching the fifth stud down in his right ear, and the cold, numb feeling faded). James cut the left sleeve in a few places and tucked in a few others, making sure it was tight against the metal of his left arm so that when he wore it the revealed metal looked more like plated decoration and not a prosthetic that could crush steel. He added a black leather glove with the fingers cut off, sewn in place. While in close proximity, it was unlikely he could pass the prosthetic for flesh, but he could make it look like it had a custom cover for a more conventional limb replacement, and might be able to pass as simple style over flesh in a less-discerning crowd.

It was time to test whether or not he was going to be able to move around without hiding. He found a small jar of something to run through his hair to make it spike and show off the metal in his ears, smudged dark makeup around his eyes (makeup, decoration, not combat paint to reduce glare and the sensitivity that came from keeping him in the dark like a grub for years on end), and purchased a ticket to a concert where he could be another red fish, his style matched to theirs to pass as a person, and not a weapon of a shadow war.

He didn’t know the band, or any of the songs. The music had a driving beat, but annoying guitar and asinine lyrics. Yet everyone else here, leather-and-metal clad, seemed to be enjoying it, and he was far from the strangest-looking person in the room. He was actually downright tame compared to some of the people he’d seen gyrating in the mosh pit.

(He stayed far, far clear of that. He was having enough trouble staying in the crowded venue; put him in the mosh pit and he’d have been slamming people aside, putting them through walls, reflexively looking for an exit.)

James got several appreciative looks, a couple compliments on his “bitchin’ jacket.” He kept touching the fourth stud up, remembering people complimenting him before, how that had been positive attention he'd relished. The compliments were not a failure of cover, not a breach in the mission, and he held onto that so firmly that the well-wishers had never known they had come within a few heartbeats of tripping the asset's self-preservation protocols. 

To his surprise, there were also two separate propositions from women with tattoos that nearly qualified as full body coverage. Some things he remembered would have had him tumbling them in a New York minute, laughing all the while as they shared their enthusiasm. But right now James wasn’t entirely sure he wouldn’t hurt them, accidentally or otherwise. There were still plenty of memories he hadn’t sorted out yet, and it would be a stupid risk to take. So he told them he was waiting for someone. It wasn’t even a lie. Until he could come to Steve with understanding and not so many questions that he was lost…

The women pouted some, but wished him well, diving back into the crowd to find someone else to feed their appetites. 

James returned to the motel in a mild state of elation. No one had noticed his disguise, no one had guessed. He could start to travel again, he could be…

He needed more, more memories, more solid anchors to all the past that he had. Then maybe he could finally come home. Find home. On his own terms, once he knew more about who he was. He could find Steve again.

\--

He went to a professional for the rest of the metal so that the placement was perfect. He always picked the smallest, smoothest studs, his quick healing preventing them from migrating, keeping them solidly in place as if they had been a part of him from the beginning. Soon both ears were thick with metal, all over. Eyebrows, with tiny spikes, in several places. Nose. Lips. Tongue. Playing with the barbell helped when he couldn’t touch any of the others. Like a lightning rod, it grounded. Every bolt of metal a memory, fixed in time, put in order.

_(Born in New York, I had a younger sister and brother, Steve and I were best friends – are best friends. Fought the good fight, protected him, he protected me. He would have done anything to save me.)_

Some of the returning memories hurt like shoving a red-hot poker through his brain.

_(Fatherly voice and casual cruelty, a message he had to hear to continue to operate. Cold-blooded murderer, and he was so, so good at it.)_

Pierce, he learned from watching the news, was dead. Good. One less thing to put on his list.

Some memories nearly made him faint with nausea when they came into focus.

_(Battering Steve’s face to a pulp because it was the only thing he could think to do to finish the mission that had been the only certainty in his world.)_

Some memories were a little uncertain, but welcome, in a good way. He remembered the girls he’d flirted with before, smiling at them, exchanging small talk, dancing, and sometimes more. He’d _wanted_ , before. He’d desired, and been able to do something about it. 

He wanted to be able to do something about desire again. He wanted to be whole, no matter if he had to be stitched together with metal to do it. 

James had switched motels again, to one with embarrassingly large mirrors in the bathroom. (Touching a stud in his left ear, he recalled a mission where he had to wait in a place like this for three days for his target. His support team had made enough crude comments to fill a TV series during that time out of sheer boredom. The asset hadn’t been bored. The asset hadn’t felt anything.) But it suited his purpose as he stripped in the caustic bright light of the tiled room and looked himself over critically. He hadn’t had much cause to think of his body as anything more than a vehicle for his head, and it was time to see what other memories he could jar loose and nail down.

For having endured seventy years of frozen hell, James has to admit that he actually looked very good. Aside from the scarring around the metal arm, he was clean, unblemished, courtesy of whatever chemicals and compounds Zola had used on him. Hard-muscled from a training regimen he had seen no need to stop, his body was healthy. He watched himself for a long time, letting what memories float to the surface that would, and ran his right hand down his flank, along his chest, over his nipple. Pleasure sparked and he drew in a sharp breath. Steadying himself, he reached down and held his penis, looser and less businesslike than when he urinated. Waited again, breathing, and let unmoored memories of laughing, pretty faces, flushed with desire, acres of skin exposed when he leaned over them, gasps and breathy moans, let all of that play across his mind’s eye. When he came back to himself, he was hard, and had a lingering memory of quashed guilt as he stroked himself, chasing the physical high the boys laughed about when the adults weren’t around. He touched the ninth stud up in his right ear and remembered washing out a stained sock in the sink so his mother wouldn't see the evidence of puberty. At the time, he'd been defiant and mortified. Now, it made his lips crease in a rusty smile. 

James let himself go and regained his calm – he still had that desire somewhere in him. They hadn’t taken it from him, just made him ignore it. Not anymore. He grabbed his coat and headed out for the body piercing parlor he’d picked out.

\--

James lay back in the chair as the artist arranged her needles, gauze, and the barbells he’d picked. Sleeves connected by straps across his collarbones still covered his arms, hiding the flesh-metal join of his shoulder. What could pass in the chaos of a concert or the casual scrutiny of walking around in public would never be able to be hidden if he had to take his shirt off, so he hadn’t even tried. 

The asset had almost never been used for undercover missions due to the fact that they kept frying his brain, but they had made sure he could walk in a crowd or take public transportation if he had to (though in the latter decades, that had fallen by the wayside as they needed less stealth and more shock and awe). The arm was always a problem for disguise, but during such need the asset had been tasked to move it like it was fake instead of a superior replacement, swinging stiffly and using the hand as a crude pincher instead of a weapon in its own right. It was an easy disguise to assume. He’d told the artist a version of the truth she could accept to back up his story.

_“I was in the army, lost my arm on a mission. I want to keep the cover on, if you don’t mind.”_

James… Bucky had been a good liar, if the cause had been right. No one was going to be so much of an ass as to ask to see his war wounds in public, at least not anyone he was going to let near him with a needle. The parlor and artist he’d checked the same way he assessed a threat in the field. Their records were clean, and he knew where the exits were.

The artist was named Galena, and she was everything his prep team technicians weren’t. She didn’t resemble a single one of them he could remember, female or male, her shop was clean but eclectically decorated, the chair was very different, and he wasn’t strapped down and being offered a mouth guard so someone could try to simplify the world down to what the asset needed to know.

Galena didn’t need to know she was about to put nipple piercings in one of the most feared assassins of the 20th and 21st centuries. 

He waited patiently as she put out the sterile equipment, put gloves on her clean hands, and forbore from telling her he'd once pulled a bullet from his own intestines with the help of a rusty spoon, so infection really wasn't going to be a problem.

“Most men find this more painful than their facial piercings,” Galena said, picking up a needle and checking the placement of the marker dots on either side of his right nipple. James just made a vague sound that could have been interpreted as agreement, part of his attention elsewhere, hunting for a surfacing memory to attach to the newest metal about to go into his body. Galena gently pinched the nub of flesh to make it stand up, and James found an image of a smiling girl, her head lying on his chest, her fingernails scratching over the tight, pink peak to hear him groan. 

“Do it,” he said. A brief pinch and feeling of pressure, a sensation of heat, and a few moments later a barbell was neatly seated in his flesh. Galena was as good as his observations, and James found another memory to anchor as she approached his other side.

When she was done, James let his eyes close to focus on the memories of touch, pleasure, hot mouths against his skin and hands covering him. His heartbeat sped up a little, and James could feel a host of much older memories wanting a place to stay. None of them belonged to the asset, not a single one, because HYDRA hadn't cared for him to be distracted. They'd tried to destroy desire along with his past, making him into a murder machine, not a man.

James was a man. Bucky... Bucky had been, was, a man, a man who'd had women who'd lain against his naked chest. He reached up to brush his hand against the metal in his nose and mouth, remembering the scent of them, the taste of them, their skin and lips and so much more, hands in his short hair (HYDRA had kept his long, why? To make him unrecognizable to himself in the mirror, maybe), tugging as he put his mouth to work on them.

“It looks like you heal fast,” Galena said, throwing away the needles in their containers, and putting the other tools in the autoclave.

“I do.” James took his hand away from his mouth and moved his down to his belt. Galena's eyes followed, and she raised a speculative eyebrow.

“You're looking for some more, I take it?”

If he had to stitch himself together, he would do it to regain everything that he had. He promised himself that he would.

“Yeah.”

Galena smiled. “Let's see how those heal up, and then we can make another appointment.”

\--

He made more than one. A lot more. There were a lot of memories in the flesh, a lot of smiling faces, a lot of dark rooms and passionate moans, some purely his own, others when he was joined in chorus with one or more. Sex had a lot of memories, a lot more good than bad, and each barbell in his flesh, whether along the shaft of his penis, through the head, or far lower, held another piece of himself together.

Apparently, before everything had happened, he'd been quite the horny devil. The thought made him smile when he ran his hand down the shimmering metal that decorated him.

There were other memories that surfaced when he felt the smooth metal against the hard, flushed skin of his dick. Memories he wasn’t exactly sure of, things he might have misinterpreted, less memories of encounters and perhaps more along the lines of speculations and half-forgotten daydreams. He and Steve had been close, and Steve had always been looking for the right partner. Maybe one or two of their glances had been a little more heated than just close friendship. Or maybe he was looking too closely at things that hadn’t made sense even back then.

But he wouldn’t know until he tried.

\--

James wanted to try. He wanted to see if everything he’d learned, everything he’d discovered about himself, had made a difference. Could he be as human as he thought he was, as his newly-anchored memories said? Could he get close without hurting himself or someone else if something unexpected surfaced? It was a risk, a damn big risk if he miscalculated.

(A part of him was proud of that thought, that he could consider the life of a stranger to be important enough to worry about. The asset had only cared about who he was told was important. Collateral damage had literally meant nothing.)

Life was risk. And he was not the only damaged person in the world.

–

Her name was Simone. She wasn't really a fan of the concert he'd gone to, any more than he was, but she surveyed the crowd with an attention he recognized, even if her purpose was far more benign than was his usual. Little sparks of metal glinted from her skin nearly dark as his hair, striking sparks like lightning as the spotlights and lasers played over the crowd. Her smile was wide, genuine, brilliant and healthy and confident. She knew exactly what she was looking for, and what she wanted out of them.

Good, because James ( _Bucky_ ) wasn't quite up for taking the lead on this one. He touched a stud near the top of his right ear and remembers Agent Carter (he had never gotten comfortable calling her by her first name except when Steve was waxing eloquent about her virtues around the campfire). He wasn't going to be diminished by a strong woman. No, he needed a woman who knew a hell of a lot more than he did right now.

“It's Simone,” she told him, when the crowd eventually let him drift close enough to her. She looked him up and down. He hadn't even said a word yet, but she'd already divined his purpose. If this were a mission, he would be so very compromised right now.

He brushed the seventh stud in his left ear with a carefully-stiff hand. He'd been punished when he failed. He wouldn't be punished now.

“James,” he managed. Simone looked him over, assessing him, and James had to wonder what expression was on his face that her smile turned dazzling. She raised an eyebrow in a way he vaguely remembered, and he nodded.

“Let's get out of here.” And she grabbed his right hand to pull him through the crowd.

One thing he did remember – things moved much faster in this time. That was all to the good.

Simone paused only once when they had tumbled together on the hotel bed, bracing herself against him, her hand sliding to the unyielding form of his left arm and the cloth that covered it. The brush of his hand against his right ear was quick as he slid his hand around her waist, pulled her closer, and whispered to her what he had to Galena.

She yielded in understanding, her hand coming to cup his face (he directed her down to his neck, not wanting the cascade of memories from his left side piercings to sully the moment). No panic was stirring, and James felt his blood heating as more of Simone's body was laid bare. His tongue touched the studs run through his lips, and he slid down her body until her thighs cradled his head ( _“Bucky, please, God, right there, please, please, just touch me, please!”_ ) and leaned in to touch his tongue to the salt of her folds.

Simone screamed when she came, and there was no sound of pain or loss in it.

He felt his heart clenching, a part of it melding together whole, when she urged him up to have her own way with him. 

–

His name was Chad. He was a month after Simone, another concert, another band, another city. He wasn't confident as Simone, but he was grinning and eager and intrigued by James' looks, and James needed that enthusiasm because his memories of this were murky. Unrealized. Thought about, but never really acted on.

Another thing to like about this time – when Chad planted a laughing kiss on his mouth in the middle of the crowd, barely anyone reacted. 

He reminded James a little of a younger version of Morita, with less sarcasm and more jokes. He certainly could use the laughter. 

Chad didn't seem to even give his left arm a second look, too intrigued by the novelty of the modifications James had made to his body. The look gave James a sudden surge of recklessness, brushing against a tiny stud he found a slow, dirty smile somewhere in him when he whispered where they could go to be alone.

Sex wasn't so different than with Simone. Different parts, but certainly nothing he hadn't seen before, and James (Bucky) felt the surge of pleasure take him by surprise when Chad ran a slick-lubed hand down his condom-covered cock, his fingers catching slightly on every small ball of metal up and down the shaft and head. Chad's hardness pressed against his in return wasn't so strange, not at all. It felt good, hot, and the heat let James move, explore, squeeze both of their cocks together, sliding in stuttering rhythm. It built something new in him as he threw his head back, right hand clenched hard on Chad's shoulder, barely holding back his strength.

He was still coming down when Chad had gotten his clothes on, and pressed another fast kiss to James' mouth.

“That was fun, man. Text me if you're around sometime.”

The door had shut before Bucky could even formulate an answer. By the time he had, all he could do was laugh. If Chad had come back, he might never have been able to understand. 

But Bucky did. Right now, he did.

–

It was hard to get used to, being able to want, being able to act on it. And easy. New for the way he was now, anchored by the metal the held his past. Now there were new memories to entwine with the old, and the new ones stayed without needing to be riveted through his skin. He felt... like Bucky, like someone who could be him. Saying the name inside his own head didn't feel foreign anymore.

He headed for New York the next morning.

–

He mailed a message to Steve Rogers at the tall, ugly new building with Stark's name on it. SHIELD might have fallen, but Steve was never without a place for long. Information from his briefing on Steve Rogers as a target had mentioned his connection with Tony Stark, though that hadn't been a factor in his kill plan. (Primarily because Tony Stark had publicly retired from being Iron Man, and Project Insight would have destroyed him before Rogers would have sought help. Tony Stark had been mostly irrelevant to the mission at the time.)

It hadn't taken HYDRA intelligence to track Steve's current whereabouts, however. Not with fan sites with trending “Cap Sighting” hashtags.

(Hashtags. He doesn't have any old memories for them, they're all new. Annoyingly new.)

The message was simple, a post card with a phone number, and one sentence - “I shouldn't have punched you in the face, but I couldn't figure out what else to do.” It was flip, he knew. It was also true, both for the Bucky in his old memories, and the newer ones he had made. The post card told Steve that the man he knew hadn't come back from the place he fell decades ago, though he has come somewhere closer.

Bucky could be flip if he wanted to. He had been nothing at all for far too long. To laugh, even at himself, was a godsend. It was something, it was real.

Steve called the phone number Bucky gave him the day the letter arrived, bypassing possibilities of tricks for hope. He knew _exactly_ how that felt.

“Bucky?” Steve's voice was hopeful and cracked, also very slightly breathless, as if he'd dashed for a phone the moment the post card was in his hand. Captain America got a lot of fan mail, Steve Rogers only a little less. But he still read all of it. Bucky brushed a smooth ball of metal above his right eyebrow, remembering Steve sitting at temporary headquarters, reading through a huge bag of mail at lightning speed, a huge grin on his face. Sending the post card had been as calculated as any assassination he'd ever performed as the asset. But this time the outcome would be better.

It had to be.

If Steve's friends knew who had sent that post card, Bucky would have already been caught, so he knew for this moment that this was just the two of them. Separated by technology, it was already better than their last meeting.

“Yeah, it's me, now,” Bucky said. _Now, now that I've had the time to figure things out. This is me, now._ He had to know the same as Steve did, what he would think. If he remembered their past the same way... He pressed the hard bar of one of his right eyebrow piercings into his flesh. “Steve, can we meet?”

“Where? When? You could come to the Tower, it's safe,” Steve said instantly, trust and hope thick in his voice. 

“Your friends?” Bucky had to ask; he'd worked too hard to be free to have his life sidelined again.

“They know about you. I was looking for you-” 

Bucky felt a bubble of something lodge in his chest. They knew. Steve's friends knew and they hadn't found him, hadn't turned him over to whatever authorities remained after SHIELD's fall. The prideful part of him wondered if they'd ever managed to find him at all. The cool, practical part of him pointed out he'd spent weeks compromised, and maybe he'd just been left alone. 

“I was looking for you too.” Not like Steve had, probably searching old HYDRA bases, but looking nevertheless.

Steve fell silent for a heartbeat. “I'm so sorry, I-”

Bucky cut him off, unable to hear Steve's guilt when he had a stud in his left ear reminding him of attempting to pulp Steve's face into the decking of Helicarrier Three. “I'm coming to the Tower. Make sure no one tries to shoot me.”

“Bucky...”

He made his words as forceful as possible. “You. Never. Hurt. Me. One hour.” He hung up the phone as the spinning, too-light sensation of unmooring threatened, and he tasted the barbell in his tongue, working the metal until the memories settle, good and bad and stupid and nightmarishly horrible. Steve, this was Steve who was going to trust. 

Bucky slipped the phone into his pocket and made his way down the block to the Tower, watching through the glass-walled lobby. The cameras here would pick him up eventually, and he wouldn't be able to hide, but that wasn't the point. The point was not hiding. He was no longer up on rooftops, hidden behind a mask, a figure of terror. Instead he counted the seconds before the elevator opened.

All of thirty.

Steve stepped out, incredulous hope stamped across his features, perfect and unmarred by Bucky's beating from almost a year before. Bucky made sure he was visible as he stepped into the lobby, dressed in black leather and denim, patches from concerts decorating his jacket, washes of color over his left arm where it shows through, with metal running through most of the structures of his head. Steve looked the same as last time, but Bucky.... so very much did not.

Steve stared, blinking once, not losing the hope or wonder, but seemingly frozen, uncertain what to do. Bucky couldn't be frozen, not anymore, and moved to the elevator Steve had just vacated. Like a magnet pulled to metal, Steve turned to follow, his eyes still nailed to Bucky's face, his body, as the elevator ascended rapidly. 

It took another five seconds before Steve found his voice in a single word, “Bucky?” Steve reached out, arms open, and Bucky met him halfway, settling into the strength of a confining embrace. He wanted to feel the metal warmed by another's body, someone who hadn't been interested in the novelty. The memories exploded as Steve's cheek pressed against the side of his head, into his pierced ear, his chest against the more intimate ones hidden under Bucky's shirt. Despite the confines that kept him from escaping, it was a real embrace, a willing touch by a friend. The metal was warming, and Bucky felt grounded.

The elevator doors opened unnoticed, Bucky's ears too full of Steve's accelerating breathing, until a half-familiar voice floated through the door from the room beyond.

“Hey Steve, who's the punk rocker- _holy shit_.” 

Bucky looked up to see Tony Stark staring at him in shock, half-disheveled clothes showing he'd just gotten up, a glass of something green lolling in his hand. The locator bracelets for Iron Man were slim and deadly around his wrists, and Bucky knew it would only take seconds for Stark to call his suit to him. He decided not to give two shits, because Stark was, at that moment, too surprised to think about hurting him.

It didn't take him long to recover though as Steve moved them both into a living room dominated by a huge TV and an abundance of chairs.

“Steve looked all over Europe for you.”

Bucky felt a little guilty about that.

“He looked all over _Russia_ for you,” Tony said, gesturing emphatically with his glass and somehow not spilling a drop.

Bucky felt a _lot_ guilty about that.

“Where were you?” he demanded.

It wasn't Stark's privilege to ask, but it was Steve's to hear. Bucky let go enough to look at Steve, the sunlight from the enormous wall of windows across the room catching on the metal on his face and sending glints across Steve's skin.

“Montana. Canada. Alaska. Anywhere cold.” Anywhere he could justify keeping covered until he'd figured out his solution. “I couldn't have gotten on a plane, I would have had a meltdown in transit.” Steve started at that, but then nodded slowly, dawning realization with a bit of nausea breaking over him. HYDRA hadn't wanted the asset to be too independent; they'd counted on his fear of returning memories to drive him back to his handlers. They hadn't counted on Steve. No one had counted on Steve until Bucky. He touched the stud in the lobe of his right ear, smiling at the memory, and then tapped his temple in explanation. “I was healing. Zola's formula worked. I started to remember again.”

Steve looked like he wanted to hold onto him and never let go. Bucky thought he might be very all right with that. 

There was a soft gasp to his left. She was so quiet he hadn't heard her, and danger thrilled along battle-hardened nerves before Steve's hand clamped down on him like an iron bar, solid and grounding, reminding him of where he was. _Yes._

Red hair. She had fought him in D.C. He'd stalked her during some other mission, earlier, years ago. He'd had to eliminate a target, and she'd been in the way. He'd shot her then. He'd tried to kill her a year ago. Bucky touched a stud in his left ear and a name resurfaced. Natalia. Natasha. She'd had more than one.

And this time she wasn't pointing a gun at him, or running from him.

“I shot through you once,” he said in greeting, relieved when she nodded slightly in confirmation.

“Yes.” Spare enough, but she had reason.

“You look good.” The slow smile from his oldest past played across his face in a flirt. Steve looked like he wanted to punch him in the arm like he had when they were kids, but held back. That was the last thing Bucky wanted, not now. Bucky slugged him instead (gentle!) and Steve retaliated automatically before his eyes got a little bright. If Bucky hadn't seen it coming, he probably would have sent Steve through a wall, but he figured that was something they could work on.

Stark could afford the repairs.

Natasha's training kicked in and she smiled off Bucky's flirting. Under that smile was something harder and guarded. Well, of course there was. She couldn't have survived if there hadn't been.

“I thought you said you weren't ready for that,” Natasha said, looking straight at Steve. That was apparently an inside joke, because Steve went incandescent red and tried not to choke. 

Stark apparently found the tennis match funny, or funny as he could considering he'd probably seen footage of the asset in action trying to kill the man beside him. Forget that Tony Stark was a one-man army in his suit and a walking disaster out of it. Forget he shared tower space with the Hulk, with Natasha, with Steve, a god of thunder, and Natasha's archer-assassin friend. Bucky, the asset, was the only one here who'd been part of the organization meant to destroy Stark's world.

Stark, Stark... Memory tugged, and Bucky worked the barbell in his tongue for a moment to bring it into focus. Stark's parents were dead. Had Bucky... the asset...? No, he realized. No, he'd heard someone talk about it, but he hadn't done that job himself. There had been a sabotaged break line, a broken street-light, and some extra water on the road after a late party where heavy drinking had been encouraged. Not all of HYDRA's kills of prominent people had been at his hands, just the hard ones, or the ones who needed a specific statement in their deaths. Ghost he might have been, but he was supposed to be seen just enough to create fear. Fear was useful for HYDRA's plan, and the Winter Soldier had been the boogeyman they used to keep people in line.

“I'm ready,” Bucky said, and Steve stopped blushing to look at him intently. “I... I need someplace. I-” He took a breath to articulate what he had wanted for a long time, what he'd spent all this time doing on his own, but was now ready to share. “I want to do something good. I want to remember more.” 

He touched one of the bolts going through his right ear, and Steve's eyes fixed on the motion. He had always been quick on the uptake (barring knowing when to quit) and after the procedure he'd just gotten better. 

“They help,” he said. “They anchor what I know. I remember a lot, but not always where it goes. These... fix them in place. HYDRA scrambled my brains pretty good.” 

“Bucky...” Steve looked like he wanted to punch someone in the face. That was fine; he could get in line when they found the next bunch of HYDRA rats that needed cleaning out.

Bucky knew there was a lot of anger inside him, the original him who'd been so hurt, so changed, needing to let out decades of fury. And right now he wasn't showing it, because by now it was a calculating, cruel thing he didn't want Steve to see out of context. If Steve had seen what he'd done to Craft...

“We'll find them, stop them.”

Steve didn't even hesitate. “Yes, I promise.”

“Not without me,” Bucky insisted, seeing Steve's loss, his lonely need to make up for lost time. God knew he'd seen it in the mirror more than once. Steve hesitated, but Bucky said, “I owe them.” Steve shus his mouth on any arguments, and Bucky changed the topic. “You live here.”

Now Stark looked uncertain for about five seconds before he got what Bucky was getting at. His confidence was soaring with Steve at his side, and Stark's non-violent response, Natasha's smile back at him, gave him a hint of safety.

“Eh, we rattle around in here anyway. You need a space?”

If Bucky was honest with himself, he needed a padded closet and a straightjacket, but he'd take a luxury suite in Stark Tower if that was what was offered. “Yeah, I do.”

“JARVIS, assign the Sergeant to 7010.”

Sergeant. Bucky tugged on his tongue barbell until he tasted blood to keep his shit together. Yes. Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes. Someone... someone _else_ remembered too.

Steve must have saw him go unfocused, because Bucky distantly heard him thank Stark, say good-bye to Natasha, and get in his line of sight so he could take Bucky's flesh elbow and pull him into the elevator. A quiet ride and they were at a new floor, the door opening to reveal a suite divided in two, one half clearly Steve's. Bucky had gotten enough self-awareness back to follow Steve into the living room, tastefully arranged and blistering with technology.

He'd seen some of it the tech before now, some during his recovery, and some before that. He touched the fourth stud in on his left eyebrow – some of his support team had watched endless amounts of TV or searched the Internet mindlessly while they waited for the asset's target to arrive. They'd used devices like these.

The pictures on the walls were far older. He touched the third stud down on his right ear. He used to work on those docks, play in that alley, go to that theater. His history, here, not memories anchored in metal, but right here. He went to touch them with his flesh hand, like the touch would travel through his arm and re-anchor in the stud, in his mind.

“We went here,” Bucky said, a statement that was also a question.

Steve's voice was quiet, thick. “Yes.”

“I lived in that building there. Mom, dad, younger sister and brother.” He hesitated, chasing the anchored memory. Steve started to speak and Bucky caught up to him. “Marion, Luke,” they said almost together. It goddamn _hurt_ sometimes, forcing his fucked-up brain to reach that far back, and then there was the emotional punch to the gut when he realized they died thinking he and Steve had gotten killed within days of each other and he'll never see their faces or hear their voices again. 

Steve was suddenly right there next to him, close as a breath, and Bucky realized he knew. He _understood_. Neither of them would ever meet a childhood friend, or see the city they once knew in the same way again. Food, movies, smells, all washed away in time, Steve's in frozen ice, Bucky's in frozen death.

He wanted to feel warm again. He wanted to _feel_.

“You touch them differently,” Steve said, in question and distraction and quiet understanding. He made a vague gesture, and Bucky quickly and gratefully seized on a subject that wasn't his family, at least not directly. He thought he would need some time alone to process that.

Bucky raised his right hand and ran it over the shell of his ear. “Old stuff. Before I fell.” He ghosted over the studs punched through the cartilage and flesh, remembering his living room with its green chairs, Mom's chipped blue china, Sister Miriam rapping his knuckles for sass, Father O'Donnell preaching with his snow-white beard shedding on his vestments, hauling idiots off of Steve, laughing over a stupid joke and a shared comment, serious discussions in darkened rooms about the mysteries of women, jaw clenched shut as Zola pumped him full of God knew what, walking alongside Steve and suddenly feeling small, both of them able to fight now...

He let go and brushed the left ear with his metal hand. “After I fell, until you fell into the Potomac.” The earliest memories were full of pain, all his own as they cut and lied and shaped him into little more than bullet without conscience. The rest were mostly full of other people's pain. There were visions of kill after kill, relentless training and indoctrination, needful skills pumped into him for mission after mission...

He was taking everything from them he could, every training session, every language, every piece of intel as he slowly dug them out of that maelstrom of horror. He'd fucking earned it.

Bucky brushed his hand over his eyes and the studs in his eyebrows before Steve could think too hard on what Bucky had been made to do. “Things I've seen, mostly.” Pure visual memories, places, people, maps, books and manuals he'd read. Whatever Zola had done to him had given him exceptional memory, the better to memorize information about his targets in a single glance. Now, when he touched one of the studs, he could recall whole books. He resolved to find something to remember that way that didn't have to do with someone's death.

He moved on to the nose studs, watching Steve's curious reaction with interest. “What I've smelled.” From Mom's home cooking to gun lube, food from a dozen different countries, cologne, perfume, blood, piss, shit, vomit, and fear. He was far too familiar with the stench of fear.

He moved to his lips, the small curved studs going through them, his mouth open enough to show the barbel in his tongue. “What I've tasted, what I've said.” His first cigarette, first beer, ham at Easter, a woman's skin, speaking Latin at mass, tongue curling around new syllables of German, French, Russian, Mandarin, Arabic, and others as the mission dictated. The taste of the mouth guard and his own blood.

He must have looked haunted, because Steve sounded very gentle when he spoke.

“And they help?” Steve's eyes darted all over him, uncertain where to settle.

Bucky knew how to answer that. “God, yes.”

Steve's expression settled into an uncertain smile, not sure what to think. Bucky felt a lick of cold, remember Simone's slow, smoky smile as she'd discovered the changes he'd made to his body, the sounds she'd made in her throat when they slid or caught on each other. He was not like Steve remembered. He never would be. Never could be. There was a wanting in him, but he didn't know how Steve would react if he went for it. Neither had been ready to even think about it as kids or soldiers, both more focused on more obtainable goals and wishes.

Had there been something there in the elevator, or had Bucky just been fooling himself?

And who knew what Steve might think, not just of a question of being closer than friends, but of what metal he hadn't seen yet? Chad had been enthusiastic, but Chad had been a risk-aware thrill-seeker, same as Simone, very open to the new and the different. Steve wasn't a reactionary, but seventy years' worth of future could send anyone clinging for what he knew. Bucky at least had bits and pieces of change in his memories. He plunged ahead with his own question, needing to know _something_.

“What did Natasha mean when she asked you about 'not being ready for that?'”

Steve colored scarlet and Bucky closed another step of distance between them. 

“Ah, she kept trying to set me up on dates. There was this one lady... she had a nose ring. I... said I wasn't ready for that.” The color on Steve's cheeks didn't look to have been all from embarrassment. Bucky was struck by the sudden urge to press his lips to Steve's and see what he thought now. It would be worth getting punched just to know. Bucky had tested himself enough to be sure of what he wanted and could handle. But Steve... not even his memories, anchored or fragmented, would help him answer that question. This was something new. Bucky had been ready for months, but Steve had just found him again.

“Well, I guess we'll see,” Bucky said, smiling just a little. Steve probably had a million questions, and Bucky didn't know exactly where to start. Steve looked lost, and Bucky cast about for anything, any other memory they could share. His hand brushed the cobalt stud in his left eyebrow, and he remembered Steve had had physical backup on the Helicarrier. Backup Bucky, the Winter Soldier, had disabled, maybe killed.

“The guy with the wings? He all right?”

Steve blinked at the change of subject, but seized on it anyway, grateful just to talk. “Sam Wilson. He's fine, got hurt worse by Rumlow than you.”

Bucky's-- Winter Soldier's sense of professionalism was insulted, but Wilson hadn't been the mission, just an obstacle. His life or death had been irrelevant. “Is Rumlow dead?” he asked instead.

“No one's IDed his body yet, and he was in the Triskellion when it collapsed.”

Bucky didn't hesitate when he said, “Alive, then.”

Steve apparently stopped disbelieving in the impossible when he woke up from the ice, and nodded. “Yeah, I figured. There are people on the lookout.”

Bucky remembered Rumlow as part of his support team, a competent and efficient operator, which probably meant cold-hearted and ruthless, HYRDA to the core, particularly if he had been running support for the asset. 

Bucky cared just enough to add him to the list of people who needed to stop wasting communal oxygen. Bucky wondered if Steve would be up for a cleansing mission with him when they found the bastards. Then again, maybe not. Steve fought clean. He'd want Rumlow for questioning. Bucky wanted Rumlow's head in his scope sights.

Steve hesitated, not sure where to go again, and Bucky belatedly realized death discussions were maybe not the best welcoming gift. He brushed his right ear again and dredged up an old, old smile, one that had last seen use on Agatha Morrison before his first deployment, on Simone and Chad a few months ago. Steve stared at him, looking like he'd just experienced a stun grenade going off in close proximity. This time, Bucky took charge, pulling them both to the inviting-looking couch.

“Do you...?” Steve trailed off, trying to phrase something right. “Do you want me to fill in any gaps?”

“Maybe. When I find them, I'll ask. Once I find them, I fix them. Maybe you can help me there.”

Steve blinked for a moment, looking entirely blank, then flushed, shifting his body to hide his rather visceral reaction. Bucky inwardly snarled in triumph. He could use a win. They both could.

“And new ones?” Steve asked, his voice gone tight.

“Those I remember without help,” Bucky said. This time Steve wasn't moving, wasn't looking at him uncertainly, but staring with the intent to memorize, to be able to draw him from memory. Bucky leaned in, closer, too close, waiting for hesitation, and finally closed the gap between their mouths, muscle and metal melding as one in a sweet, hot rush. Steve moaned softly and pressed them closer together with every heartbeat until they had to surface for air.

He pulled back and looked at Bucky with eyes full of hope, uncertainty, a little bit of fear, reaching up to touch his face. Bucky let him take his face with both hands, the memories going off like a fireworks show in his head, wonderful and horrible all at once. Steve gasped very slightly, a bare inhalation, and shifted his fingers off the metal. He reached up to touch his own mouth.

“I wasn't sure if I was remembering right. All thought and no action,” Bucky said, mastering the shaking from the surge of emotion with brutal efficiency. “Didn't know if you were gonna punch me in the face.”

“I wouldn't.” Steve's eyes were full of wonder, and he raised his hand, hovering. “Even when I touch, you remember...?”

“Everything. Each of these are memories, good and bad.”

Steve looked a little abashed at his eagerness causing Bucky any pain, and Bucky wondered if he'd get a chance to explain that he'd deal with that a thousand times over because he'd found himself and he'd found Steve and they were both alive and here and more-or-less in control of their own minds and a little memory surge was _nothing_ compared to the numbness of not knowing.

“It's all right. I'm here.”

Steve still looked like he was in shock, so Bucky tried to fix that with another hard kiss, this time pushing his tongue into Steve's mouth. The hard metal of the barbell made Steve start a little in surprise, and the firm little bars through Bucky's lips pressed against Steve's, but that didn't stop them. 

Bucky pulled back again and searched Steve's expression for any uncertainty before saying, “So, are you ready for that?”

“Yes.” The word tumbled out of Steve's mouth without hesitation. “Are any of them... safe?”

Bucky understood instantly that Steve wasn't talking about mundane things like infection or migration or even how they'd work on the battlefield and answered by stripping nude in three quick movements. Steve's eyes went wide when he saw the metal on Bucky's chest and cock, and bent, almost dreamlike, to take one of Bucky's nipples, and the metal shot though it, into his mouth.

Bucky moaned softly and cradled Steve's head to his chest, letting him explore until the rush of blood to his cock had gotten to the stage of torment. He could be patient when he had to, but not now. Not after everything.

“Want you, Steve. I've been pulling myself together, looking to get back to you,” Bucky murmured.

“All that time I was looking for you, you think I wasn't thinking the same?” There was challenge in Steve's voice, and Bucky remembered that while he had been searching more for himself, Steve had been traipsing over two continents looking for _him_.

“You've got me. Any way you want me.” Beneath Bucky, Steve was perfect, whole, flawless, and looking at Bucky like he was the answer to a prayer he didn't dare confess to uttering. Breathing hard but easily, Steve tugged Bucky up and into a bedroom, bringing them down to its plush cover and pulling some bottles and supplies out of a nightstand that any of their old nun teachers would have swatted them for even thinking about.

Steve trusted him beyond sense and reason of any normal person, head thrown back as he let Bucky open him up, eyes still open, unwilling to let Bucky out of his sight. Blood hot, furnace hot, Steve was heaven against his hand.

“Go on. In me, now,” Steve said, arching his back, pushing against Bucky's touch. Bucky smirked, the metal pulling nicely against his lips, and he urged Steve to roll over.

“Want to see you,” Steve said, shaking his head. Bucky pulled back, ignoring the faint sound of disappointment that quickly changed into appreciation as he slowly, sensuously, putting on a show, opened a package he'd brought with him and rolled a condom down over his length. He grabbed the bottle of slick and poured some into Steve's hand, placing it on his member and closing it around, encouraging Steve to stroke, slowly. He wasn't at all loathe to do so, and slowly Steve's eyes widened when he realized that every little piercing through the underside of the shaft, the small balls of metal through the head, what that would feel like inside him.

Bucky counted down to when Steve's pupils abruptly dilated and his mouth opened in a soundless gasp. When he tugged at Steve's hip, he turned with alacrity, the slick opening of his ass on display. 

“Now, Bucky,” Steve said, voice muffled by the comforter and slightly roughened with lust. There was no prior memory of this, not from his oldest memories, not from his newest encounters, just him and Steve. He lined himself up and sank in slowly, so slowly. He and Steve could both feel every catch and drag as every inch and gauge sunk into his tight heat, rubbing against his walls. 

“Bucky.... God...” Steve moaned. Blood hot, furnace hot, and clenching against him, Bucky could feel the metal pushing into Steve, rubbing in new and different places, driving them both higher and higher. Bucky pulled Steve upright, flush to his chest so Steve could feel the heat of the nipple piercings against his back, and made a noise like a sob when that was what pushed Steve over the edge. Bucky swiveled his hips a few times and followed him over the edge, tumbling down gratefully into their spiraled and entwined pleasure.

They breathed together for a long time before Steve turned his head. “I thought about you for a long time. I just never figured... That was one thing I didn't dare. If you... You're my best friend. And after... I couldn't.”

Bucky just pressed the right side of his face to Steve's cheek and nodded minutely. “Yeah.” No more than that – tenth stud up on that side had the whole story in shocking clarity. The girls had been great, and Steve had been great, but he hadn't been willing to lose Steve if... Steve hadn't been willing to lose him, to admit to himself any weakness. It was almost a memory Bucky wanted to lose.

Almost.

Except now he had something to counter it: Steve's breathing and moans and entreaties and the look in his eyes.

“We can be something different now,” Bucky said. Steve turned in Bucky's arms, looking like the memories from the sixth stud up on the right, from the eleventh stud up on the left, and also like none of that, because now Steve was naked and covered with the scent of sex and was looking at Bucky like his life had become complete.

HYDRA was still out there and undoubtedly wanted the Winter Soldier back in the fold or dead. Innumerable enemies still faced the Avengers and anyone who stood by them. Most of Bucky's past was held together by piercings, and Steve had just been betrayed by the organization who had been with him since the beginning of Captain America.

Steve just reached out and held them both together with a grip like metal. And Bucky knew that memory would stay.


End file.
